The balls to make the bogans laugh

Craig Mathieson

Unafraid: Melbourne's Nazeem Hussain is taking his intelligent humour to SBS later in the year with Legally Brown.

Comedian Nazeem Hussain has played a character who offered jihadists grooming tips for their facial hair.

Another faced down a group of motor racing fans after insisting the Holden car owners were losers who had to leave. Not surprisingly, he can foresee some of the notices that his race and politics-based comedy series for SBS, Legally Brown, will receive.

''There's definitely 'controversial'. That's an easy way to describe something you don't agree with,'' notes Hussain, a popular stand-up comic. ''You'll see 'edgy' as well, and a lot of 'ethnic'. But if you can't make jokes about Australia, what's the point of being an Australian comic?''

The commissioning of 10 half-hour episodes for the ''daring'' and ''boundary-pushing'' show (as the broadcaster describes it) to screen on SBS One in the second half of this year consolidates a swift and busy rise for the 27-year-old comedian. But if he already has a profile thanks to award-winning comedy duo Fear of a Brown Planet, slots on youth radio network Triple J and the Foxtel comedy show Balls of Steel, Hussain is now going to experience the accelerated attention that comes with national TV exposure.

''Is he ready for it? I'd say so,'' says Southern Star's Johnny Lowry, a producer on Balls of Steel and now Legally Brown. ''On Balls of Steel it was very apparent that Naz was a real talent and it was only natural that we'd move on to helping him develop his own show. You'll never see him give anything less than 100 per cent to anything he works on.''

Hussain says that this is more him, which is ''demanding and quite exciting''. ''You just hope it's funny,'' he says. ''I know we're all laughing. That's the challenge of comedy: you just have to do it and trust your gut. It feels like I'm just making comedy with my friends. It's easy to forget that it will be seen by a lot more people.''

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Recalling Chappelle's Show and The Chaser, Legally Brown will be based around studio segments before a live audience, where Hussain's stand-up material will contextualise and introduce filmed sketches and character pieces in which the star is filmed interacting with an unsuspecting public.

The show ''may have'' already punked some bold-faced names, according to Hussain, but even pranks will come with a clearly defined philosophy of using comedy to engage with social and racial divisions in this country. For Hussain, a practising Muslim whose parents immigrated to Australia from Sri Lanka, that means not only cracking jokes about his own community, but also the nation's white majority.

''Every time I do a stand-up joke about a white person or white people, people always follow me up after the show to say, 'Dude, you seriously can't make those type of jokes in Australia. You're talking about racism but making jokes about white people - that's racist','' Hussain recalls.

''When you're making jokes about your own community those same people will laugh hysterically, but as soon as you point the finger the other way you get, 'Come on, take it easy mate'. As an ethnic comedian there's an outside expectation that you'll only make jokes about your parents and their friends. That's tiring.''

Part of what makes the potential reaction to Legally Brown so fascinating is that Hussain is not just a stand-up comic; the professionally qualified tax consultant is also on the board of the Islamic Council of Victoria. Having sat alongside Malcolm Turnbull on Q&A he's an acknowledged spokesman for his community, which makes some conservative members urge him to moderate his humour while others, thrilled at seeing a similar face in the media, want him to go further.

On Balls of Steel, Hussain played Calvin Khan, a foreign correspondent who ventured into the heart of Australian tradition with dismissive incomprehension and hilariously mixed with the locals. The Bathurst 1000 weekend was, Khan explained, ''the Mecca for hundreds of thousands of unemployed bogans''. Legally Brown will further that satire.

''There are a lot of issues he wants to commentate on and that's something that we're doing. It's a very challenging show,'' Lowry explains. ''We are trying to make something fairly broad as well.''

Hussain says it's ''just a comedy show where we're trying to do funny stuff'', but he knows he can't separate his world view from his humour. The two inform and fuel each other, and he'd be incomplete without either side. Without the jokes he'd be another opinionated talking head; without the social and political stances he'd be a flogger of cheap gags.

What is clear, both to Hussain and Lowry, is that SBS was the only home for a Nazeem Hussain television show. The two both credit the network, whose announcement for Legally Brown cited similarly alternative predecessors such as South Park, Housos and Wilfred, with providing creative freedom and generous support to date. ''They commission daring comedies,'' Lowry adds. ''The show does deal with contemporary social issues and race relations, but it doesn't take itself seriously. That's what Naz has: the unique skill to put a hilarious spin on a serious topic.''

Hussain, who is filming sketches at present before venturing into the studio for stand-up segments next month, is gregarious and engaging and that helps him balance disappointment with the status quo as he perceives it and the wealth of material it provides. ''There's so much Australia has to catch up on,'' he says. ''It's ripe for the piss-take, but whether that means people will find it funny or a little bit raw is the question.''